Book Review : About Living and Dying in Loneliness

Dislocations by Janet Turner Hospital (Louisiana State University Press: $16.95; 210 pages)

These are short stories about exile, about the quality of being foreign, about being terminally alone. Although the author is Australian, most of these stories take place either in Canada (the antithesis of the Australian tropical rain forest) or in India (the antithesis of working-class, white Protestant drabness from which the author would seem to be fleeing).

As you read these stories, the central question becomes: Why would you leave your home, if you did choose to do that? Where would you go if you decided to leave? How far would you go in the process of putting down roots--or would you choose to remain an emotional airplane, ready, at the next discomfort, or wanderlust-attack, to move on to yet another place?

Beyond the themes of dislocation, a continuing motif of theological belief and/or disbelief infuses these stories. In “Some Have Called Thee Mighty and Dreadful,” a young housewife says goodby to her best girlfriend after a day with the kids in the park, only to find, when she gets home, that her girlfriend has died randomly, in a car accident. Again, the question becomes: What do they tell the kids? What does death mean? The possibility of a God or an after-life never comes up, and the grieving wife spirals into despair.

Burning the Dead

More stories, like “Ashes to Ashes,” pit or contrast two cultures against each other. In a little town in South India, a returning Indian fresh from his American studies decides to inaugurate an electric crematorium. The ruling elders are scandalized. Why use electricity when everyone in town has been burning the dead in the old-fashioned way for centuries? Not only that, but the returning Indian brings with him an American friend, who’s equally determined to fly in the face of his own country’s beliefs: The American meditates on a straw pallet in austere “Indian” piety until he contracts hepatitis and dies without medical attention.

The trouble with, or a side effect of, all this lack-of-belief systems is a terrible somberness. These stories are sad, sad. In “Happy Diwali,” a number of penniless exiled Indians band together to feast in a Canadian town. They are overpoweringly lonely.

In “The Owl-bander,” a very successful entrepreneur who has been the victim of a business buy-out has had a nervous breakdown and finds a night job in the northeastern wilderness, catching wild owls in huge nets, then “banding” them. The world, as he sees it, is filled with random violence: We all fly in the dark and crash unwittingly into traps we don’t know are there, or, even if we’ve been caught in them, are unable to remember. The world is scarred with meaninglessness, and the only thing a brave person can do about it is admit it without flinching.

Two Failures

To return to the “foreign” theme, if an author is a foreign observer, sometimes he or she won’t get the language, the details, right. Two stories in this collection fail in a very big way. In “The Baroque Ensemble,” a disgusting math professor dedicates himself to a life of solitariness and “the finer things of life.” From the first paragraph any reader who knows the work of Katherine Mansfield or Dorothy Parker will know the end of this very unsatisfactory tale. And in “Mosie,” the author tells a story in the first person from the voice of an American black domestic who has two gangsters for sons. The false notes here are as plentiful and painful as the ones the high school brass choir plays for the assembly.

But the last three stories here answer the questions the rest of the book has posed. “The Bloody Past, the Wandering Future” and “Morgan Morgan” examine the strands of events that brought earlier generations to Australia in the first place (that, in itself, a wrenching dislocation), and “After Long Absence” takes a look at a family environment that--while loving--would make it impossible for anyone with a creative mind to stick with.

So, final score: Three marvelous stories, two terrible ones, and all the rest extremely interesting. Good work from a sad, good writer.